Automated Coral Husbandry with CHARM

CHARM

Last week when we saw the frag cleaning robot called ‘CHARM’ the intriguing video had me asking questions. Isn’t it easier to clean frags by hand? How is this robot supposed to recognize all sorts of frags? Is this thing even real?? We had to know more.

What we found online was CHARM, (Coral Husbandry Automated Raceway Machine) aims to automate repetitive tasks when growing coral in a coral nursery or laboratory. CHARM also offers the opportunity for combining coral farming with computer automation to reduce costs and save time.

Happy #WorldIPDay! Meet CHARM, a robot that farms coral.Beyond Coral team members and our wonderful friends are celebrating our first, patent-pending invention which combines #coralfarming with #roboticautomation to grow #coral!Research shows it takes 4,000 hours to clean and maintain 10,000 coral fragments… the equivalent of 3 people working full-time for 1 year! In order to restore our reefs at the rate they are dying, we estimate that 100,000 corals will need to be outplanted EVERY DAY. That's a lot of labor.Because staff labor accounts for approximately 50% of annualized costs at coral nurserises, CHARM aims to automate the frequent and reptitive tasks–such as cleaning, feeding, and fragging– to minimize time and expenses while maximizing coral.Another very important aspect of CHARM is that it built with commercial off-the-shelf parts and is affordable for the coastal communities who depend on coral reefs for their main source of food and income. By empowering the world with CHARM, we hope citizens will maximize the benefits of growing coral in a land-based nursery while minimizing the need to harvest coral from the wild.Beyond Coral Foundation is yet one year old but we are moving quick with #VR #technology and #oceanconservation for #environmentalstewardship. Feel free to reach out and see how you can help us save the #reefs!

We still needed to know more and got connected to Stephen Rodan, the creator of CHARM for a zoom chat. Stephen is an engineer passionate about coral reefs, especially restoring coral reefs in the wild. He is also a hobbyist, keeping a saltwater aquarium with his father since he was young.

Wanting to have a positive impact on the environment Stephen started the Beyond Coral Foundation with the goal of protection, conservation, and restoration of reef systems using technology, art, culture, and education. Through his foundation, he began collaborating with like-minded coral lovers and visiting coral restoration projects around the world.

While visiting different projects, a challenge that stuck out was the amount of time required for the rearing of micro coral fragments. In particular, they found that spawned and settled frags took extra care as compared to or asexually produced frags.

Example of single species Orbicella raceway being cared for by Dr. Vaughan at Mote Marine laboratory.

Often in a laboratory setting or land-based coral restoration facilities in the Caribbean, many raceways will be filled with thousands of identical coral frags. Cleaning and rearing these fragments takes a lot of time with repetitive tasks, mostly cleaning and inspecting the fragments.

Combining his engineering background and desire to see more coral fragments being produced efficiently, he came up with the idea of CHARM.

How it works

CHARM is more than just a toothbrush on a robotic arm, and an important component of the device is the cloud-based computer software. To control CHARM, users select a program sequence from the online portal using a computer or smartphone app.

At the end of the CHARM raceway are multiple tooltips and when prompted, the machine carriage switches to the corresponding tool, for example, a soft bristle brush to remove algae.

The on board camera uploads images to computer software that can differentiate algae from coral initiating a cleaning sequence. However, this software also holds the potential to inspect for color changes ie, signs of disease, bleaching, or pests. It was this camera software that had me thinking of its potential for coral farming facilities in the hobby.

While CHARM is still a prototype, it does have the potential to scale up the production of nursery-grown frags for restoration. We can definitely get behind the potential of installing CHARM over single species raceways and can find additional software features that could benefit the husbandry of corals in multi-species raceways.

CHARM is part of a larger initiative from the Beyond Coral Foundation whose ultimate goal is the protection, conservation, and restoration of reef systems using technology, art, culture, and education.

Nicole Helgason is a professional scuba diver and can often be found photographing corals and sharing her passion about coral reefs around the world. Nicole is Reef Builders Event Manager and is responsible for running ReefStock shows in Denver and Sydney. Nicole is also a manager for Reef Builders social media accounts and a weekly contributor to the Reef Builders site. Nicole has a Bachelors degree in Coastal Geography from the University of Victoria, and is originally from Vancouver Canada.